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You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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Bonnie Jo Campbell
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 14
Novelist
Writer
Kalamazoo
Michigan
Thing
Sonnet
Good
Damned
Beat
Beats
Married
Write
Without
Writing
More quotes by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
When I was little, we lived on 8 acres and my mom had a horse. But when I was 7, my mom kicked my dad out, and then in order to feed us five kids, she got critters cheap or for free and raised them for food. We milked a cow, raised chickens, pigs and beef cattle. We heated our one-story house with wood and stayed cold all winter.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
A Life in Men is a joyful, ambitious novel that is also an adventure traversing three continents, as well as a meditation on love, sex, and, most important, friendship, which can overcome time, distance, and even death.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
I do different work, teaching and running around visiting universities and bookstores, and that prevents me from writing. But it's nice to be wanted as a writer.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
For 'King Cole's American Salvage,' I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they're not being written about much anymore. I'm very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Where I live you're not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in the new-millennium America.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me something doesn't seem right. I have my mother's boyfriend, Loring Janes, read to make sure I get everything right with the machines and guns.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
We have a shotgun we inherited from my father-in-law, a paranoid Englishman living in Texas. I have a .22 Marlin rifle, similar to the one Annie Oakley had, and my husband has a .357 Magnum pistol. All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
I'm pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
